INTRODUCTION

The “era of abundance”, so vividly demonstrated today, brings a wide array of

choices due to the endless list of items on the Internet. The main task of any store
is to sell more goods and faster at a more price, thereby increasing profit for the
owner. In offline stores the consultants are used to for recommended products.
But in online AI based recommendation systems are used to help the consumers/
customers to find the products they might want to buy, thereby increasing the
likelihood of the customer to purchase an item from their store. It is estimated
that 35% revenue of Amazon and around 75% revenue of Netflix comes from
personalized product recommendation. This is why most of the online stores
these days try to have these systems to increase their revenue, as the customer
might get recommended the product, they might want which otherwise would’ve
been hard to find, By learning customer behavior patterns. These patterns are
processed and the systems are reviewed with the help of various AI approaches
such as fuzzy techniques, transfer learning, genetic algorithms, evolutionary
algorithms, neural networks and deep learning, Natural Language Processing,
computer vision and active learning along with the other advances in the fields of
big data analytics. The observations made in this paper would be of help to
researchers and professionals trying to learn more and better understand about
the AI recommendation systems.
MAIN MODELS USED IN AI RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS
Recommender systems were first used to reduce the information overload
problem caused by the web 2.0 and were quickly expanded for the
personalization of e-government, e-learning and e-business so the recommender
systems were designed to find utility of an item and see whether it is worth
recommending or not.
f:U×I→D
This is the formula used for making a list of items ranked by utility D by measuring
utility of a specific item i ∈I and user u ∈ U.
AI recommendation systems are of three types: Content Based Systems,
Collaborative Filtering Systems, Knowledge Based Systems.
Content Based Systems:
These systems are based on data collected on specific items and user’s
preferences. The system then analyzes item attributes and then recommends
similar items. These are preferable when we have information on the items but
not on the user. To simplify we take a look at items that the user took interest in
earlier and look for similar items.
Advantages:
1. Doesn’t require much information
2. Doesn’t need to deal with user information
3. There’s no cold start problem for new items
4. Can easily work for new users too as no user information required

Collaborative Filtering Systems:

This system uses information about all user’s past behavior like purchase or
ratings. This model is then used to predict items or rating of products that the
user may like. To better understand, If one user buys products similar to another
one. Then it’s likely that they may buy/want similar products again.
Advantages:
1. It is capable of accurately recommending complex items such as movies
without requiring an “understanding” of the item itself
2. It’s not required for the system to know all products and users
3. Being versatile these systems can be implemented in any domain and can
also provide cross domain recommendations too
Disadvantages:
1. Any new user or product requires feedback to make accurate
recommendations (Cold Start Problem)
2. More computational power is required
3. Due to an endless list some of the products might remain unrated

Knowledge Based Systems:

Knowledge Based Systems require knowledge or information on the subject area
(not much on the items). This additional knowledge helps make decisions on
conditions other than just similarity. For example, it would recommend a laptop
bag after you’ve just bought a laptop. Unlike where after buying a laptop it
recommends more laptops of other types (which is completely useless).
VARIOUS PROBLEMS FACED WHILE IMPLEMENTING AI BASED
RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS

Gathering Known Ratings for Matrix

It has been observed that most of the users do not give any ratings. So, a research
problem arises on how to know whether they are satisfied with the product and
how much. There are two ways of taking ratings. When is explicit like asking them
after they have purchased or gone through any item. Another way which is
predicting their ratings for a particular item based on their preferences on some
other item. This method is known as an implicit method of collecting ratings.

Cold Start
Cold start is a potential problem in computer-based information systems which
involves a degree of automated data modelling. Specifically, it concerns the issue
that the system cannot draw any inferences for users or items about which it has
not yet gathered sufficient information.
It has three cases:
1. New Community: refers to the startup of the system when there is no
information for the system to use
2. New User: this refers to when a user has just joined the community and the
system has no past records to rely on for recommendation so it just
recommends arbitrarily or based on some other backup system
3. New Item: this refers to when a new item has just been added to the
catalogue so due to no records to work with the system recommends it
rarely or not at all. This makes a negative loop in which there would be a
list of items which are rarely recommended and thus have poor rating, this
loop goes on and on.
Scalability
It is the property of any system in which comes into action when we increase
work load (in our case increase in number of users) and see whether our system
can provide desirable performance. It might even produce inappropriate output
as accuracy decreases with increase in data due to not so scalable system.
Scalability can be categorized into two types: Hardware Scalability and Software
Scalability.
Hardware Scalability can be achieved by using more powerful computing devices
whereas, Software Scalability is about writing algorithms and using methods
which work well when hardware configuration is increased as needed in future.

Changing data and changing user preferences

In current day scenario it’s likely that the data in use is outdated thereby
producing useless recommendations, this is because data is generated at a very
high rate so it’s important to update our databases from time to time but it’s
easier said than done. As it can be very tough to update our data due to its
massiveness. Also, one of the causes for changing data is changing user
preferences because as time passes more options are available to users so there’s
a higher chance for a change in preference.
SOME OF THE APPLICATIONS OF RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS

NETFLIX

Data sources for Netflix data recommendation systems are:

1. Billions of user ratings, with millions added each day
2. Stream related data such as playback time, day of the week, device type,
etc...
3. Pattern of lists that users add to their queues
4. Metadata related to the titles that the user views
5. Search related textual data
It uses its famous AI system named ‘Cinematch’ for which they even organized a
competition which challenged the developers to make a system that can handle
around 1 billion user data which was scaled to handle 5 billion user data.
Problems faced by their team while building the system
 Ensembling of different models to predict a single output.
 Optimizing the RMSE of the ensemble.
 Automatic Parameter Tuning for the models was also a challenge.
 Global effects for capturing statistical correlations.
 Capturing Global Time Effects and Weekday Effect.
 Detecting whether the short-term effects are due to multiple people
sharing the same account or the change in the moods of a person.
AMAZON

They use Collaborative Filtering model which they based their product
recommendation on product correlation rather than similarities in users. With
item-to-item collaborative filtering, on the other hand, the recommendation
algorithm would review the visitor’s recent purchase history and, for each
purchase, pull up a list of related items. Items that showed up repeatedly across
all the lists were candidates for recommendation to the visitor. But those
candidates were given greater or lesser weight depending on how related they
were to the visitor's prior purchases.
CONCLUSION
In this paper we’ve discussed the various models used in AI recommendation
system along with the problems faced in the development of these systems. This
is aimed at giving a proper introduction to some of the elements of AI based
recommender system.

REFERENCES
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
348396730_Research_Problems_in_Recommender_systems https://
indatalabs.com/blog/ai-based-recommender-system %20relevant
%20suggestions %20to %20users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_start_(recommender_systems)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40747-020-00212-w#Sec2
https://towardsdatascience.com/netflix-recommender-system-a-big-data-case-
study-19cfa6d56ff5
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~samir/498/Amazon-Recommendations.pdf
https://www.amazon.science/the-history-of-amazons-recommendation-
algorithm

By Jatin Rajesh Bhai Patel

Enrollment No.: 191200116035